Bell continued testing and building rocket belts and trained a team to show them off.1 Hal Graham, however, stopped flying the rocket belt after an incident that is still the subject of some controversy. Reports on the rocket belt program insist that of the thousands of flights made by the rocket belt, no flights ever ended badly. Bell always reported a 100 percent success rate. Some critics would point to the accident that broke Wendell Moore’s knee, but Bell would argue that was a tethered test flight. Still, there was another rocket belt accident. In 1962, Graham was traveling the country doing demonstration flights. At Cape Canaveral they wanted him to launch from a platform that was held in the air by a forklift. Graham was unaware that the platform was not sturdy and that no one had tested it to see what would happen when the rocket belt was blasted off it at full throttle. When he attempted to take off, the platform shifted and Graham lost his balance before he was completely under power.2 He fell twenty-two feet to the ground and hit his head so hard his helmet broke. He was unconscious for half an hour—and would never fly the rocket belt again.3
The story was never mentioned when talking about the reliability of the belt. It would not be well known until more than forty years later when Graham told a gathering of rocket belt aficionados about it. In a widely read article written in 1963 by one of the highest-level managers of Bell, Graham’s accident was glossed over. “Although never seriously injured during his tenure, he did have a few bad spills and collected many bruises.”4 Graham left Bell shortly after the crash. In all, he made eighty-three free flights with the rocket belt, many of them before large crowds and VIPs.5 If Graham’s flights had not gone as well, the program most likely would have floundered. In later years, fans of the rocket belt referred to him as “His Eminence.”
Moore trained a few other men to fly the rocket belt. Joining Peter Kedzierski were Robert F. Courter Jr. and Gordon Yaeger (no relation to Chuck Yeager). Not everyone Bell hired made the grade. One pilot was trained but after a few harsh landings, Bell decided it had to let him go. Another was a former army flight instructor. He, too, made a bad landing in public and was fired. There were at least three rocket belt pilots who made it through the training phase of the program only to be let go because they committed bad performances in front of an audience.6
Bob Courter would become a major figure in the individual lift device field. Like some of the others at Bell, he had gone to school and studied engineering but had not graduated. In 1945, he trained as a pilot for the US Army and became a flight instructor. After his discharge, he moved to the Buffalo area and trained student pilots at Niagara Falls Aeronautical Corporation. In 1951, his instructing duties were interrupted by the Korean War. The New York Air National Guard activated him, sending him to fly several hundred hours of combat in a P-51 Mustang over Korea. By 1953, he was discharged as a first lieutenant. He was specifically hired to replace Hal Graham and would be in charge of the rocket belt pilots.7 When he arrived at Bell, he was a combat veteran, certified pilot, and licensed to fly single and multiengine aircraft. He also held his instructor’s rating. He first flew the rocket belt in July 1962.8
In 1964 a promoter named Clyde Baldschun contacted the marketing department at Bell. Baldschun booked events for state and county fairs, and his teenage son had read about the rocket belt.9 Previously, Bell had turned down many requests to demonstrate the belt for the public because it was still testing the belt for the army and the cost was prohibitive. Baldschun assured Bell that he could book events for the flying belt at fairs and everyone would come out ahead financially. Bell’s marketing department realized this might be a good way to keep the rocket belt in the public eye. Perhaps it would help with Bell’s lobbying efforts for funding. The rocket belt team was soon at the 1962 Calgary Stampede. Bell charged the Stampede $25,000 to put on a series of flights over the period of a week, and Baldschun got a 20 percent cut for his efforts.10
Bell sent Courter out with the others to demonstrate the rocket belt far and wide, often to places Baldschun had booked. Courter and Kedzierski took turns wowing crowds in Chicago. Photos of the two accompanied a story in the Chicago Daily News quite typical of the rocket belt tour. “Visitors to the Chicago International Trade Fair are getting a look at the future through daily rocket flights by two performers. Several times daily the rocket men, powered by strapped-on Small Rocket Lift Devices (SRLD), soar 60 feet from the lakefront just east of McCormick Place.”11 It was a good year to see the rocket belt. The device was flown 396 times in public in 1964, including 170 flights at the world’s fair. Bell estimated that two million people saw the belt fly.12
Bell continued pitching the rocket belt to the military, presumably because it knew that the government had deep enough pockets to fund a much broader research and development endeavor. In March 1963, Science and Mechanics ran an article expounding on the fantastic military capabilities of the rocket belt. The article, “America’s aerial foot soldiers,” was a mix of fact and fiction. Photos of the belt were interspersed with an artist’s illustrations of the belts used in combat. Many of the images depicted the physically impossible. One showed a soldier flying over a battlefield while firing a bazooka. Another showed a soldier firing a gun at a jet—flying only a couple stories above a street between high rises! The rocket belt in each illustration was apparently controlling itself.13
The article described a recent flight by Peter Kedzierski. He had taken a ride up to a forty-five-foot altitude and covered 815 feet. At one point, he was said to be traveling sixty miles per hour. The article does not mention how short the flight lasted. Instead, the article focused on how a soldier could shoot at planes from “nine stories” up in the air, a height no rocket belt had ever flown. The final illustration showed American rocket belt pilots landing on a beach, but something ominous was on the horizon: The enemy was coming at them wearing rocket belts!14 The message was clear: if we don’t start equipping our soldiers with these space-age devices, our enemies will start using them against us!
Kedzierski’s speed and distance—sixty miles per hour and 815 feet—were records for the rocket belt at that time. A few months later, he and Courter flew at the Paris Air Show. This was the first time the belt had been demonstrated overseas.15 When Flight announced their appearance, it gave the flight ranges of the belt as 815 feet, with a top speed of sixty miles per hour, and top altitude of sixty feet.16 Bell scheduled fifteen flights at the show to be made by Courter and Kedzierski.
The trip to France involved some high drama. The fuel for the rocket belts was shipped to the docks at Le Havre where some dockworkers ignored the KEEP UPRIGHT warnings on the vented drums containing the hydrogen peroxide. As they rolled one of the drums along the wooden dock, it began leaking and caught fire. After a few panic-filled minutes, the fire was extinguished; the dockhands might not have even realized how close they came to blowing up the dock. Years later, Courter pointed out that the workers, if they had known enough about the fuel, could have simply rolled the leaking drum over the edge of the dock and into the ocean. The water would have neutralized the hydrogen peroxide.17
Writers from Flight in Paris were as impressed by the rocket belt as the writers who had seen it before them. Its first flight was short and low, covering only a thirty-yard distance out-and-back at a height of no more than five feet, but the belt’s potential seemed clear to the audience. And while many people who saw the rocket belt elsewhere commented on how loud it was, the writers at the Paris Air Show said the belt caused “relatively little noise.”18 A photo in a later edition covering the events of the air show depicted one of the rocket belt pilots hopping “over the American space exhibits dome.”19 The writer of the piece did not get a good look at the rocket belt in flight, though. The “rocketeer” launched so suddenly that he only caught a glimpse of it. The rocket belt’s capabilities played into the disappearing act: the writer lost sight of the pilot “behind the crowd,” a place where the rest of the aircraft at this show could never hide.20
In October 1964, Popular Mechanics ran one of its most expansive pieces on the rocket belt. Courter spoke with the writer and was even credited as cowriter of the piece called “I Fly the Man Rockets.” Courter had now flown more than 250 times—the other Bell pilots had flown more than 550 times combined—and wanted to tell the readers what it was like to fly “like the birds.” He admitted that the longest flights of the rocket belt were only twenty-one seconds, but then he quickly moved on to the control process. His right hand worked the throttle and his left hand held a control that turned the jetavators, which redirected the thrust to help him turn in mid-air. Then, he simply gunned the throttle and in a deafening roar, he was lifted into the air. It was as if “a giant had put a hand beneath my arms and another where I sit, jerking me off my feet. In an instant, I’m airborne. Next, I’m flying like the birds.”21
The piece carried photos of Courter sixty feet in the air, flying over treetops, and images of him demonstrating the rocket belt at the 1964 world’s fair in New York. Courter then went on to make some bold predictions, coupled with some secretive-sounding hints about things to come. “Man rockets—and their high-rocketing wearers—will be as common as helicopters in the decade to come. And, if anything, even more versatile.” The rocket belts would be used by firefighters, surveyors, construction workers, military patrols, sportsmen, and fishermen, getting them to the hottest fishing spots. “They may even fly commuters over the bumper-to-bumper traffic.”
Courter was not wrong in suggesting that people at Bell thought the belt might someday be used by everyday people. Wendell Moore’s daughter later told a writer, “That was his dream—that it would become like a second car. That and to have the army pick it up. It was like a vehicle of the future for him.”22 Bob Roach, a project engineer for the rocket belt program, wrote an article in 1963 about the history of the Bell project up to that date. When describing the potential of the belt he pointed out, “Some see it as the answer for the traffic-jammed commuter.” However, he suggested that more practical uses for the technology were in outer space or on the surface of the moon.23
The readers of Popular Mechanics should have noticed that many of the things Courter described were impossible with the limited twenty-one-second flight time, regardless of how inexpensive the devices became. Courter then dropped a bomb; he claimed Bell was on the verge of a huge breakthrough in rocket belt technology. “I base these predictions on a breakthrough, revealed here for the first time. A new, more efficient fuel promises to give Bell’s man-hefting rockets 50 times their present range, up to perhaps 10 miles of free flight at 60 M.P.H. or better. Technically, the new fuel catapults man-rockets from the realm of a limited-range prototype to workaday reality.”24
Courter did not couch his language or caution readers that the flying belt might not become widely available. On the contrary, he suggested they were right around the corner. “The day is closer than you may think.” They might be pricy, but not prohibitively so. They are “apt to be Cadillacpriced.” And they were easy to fly! There was no pilot’s license required, and the FAA didn’t even regulate them. “The learning is not much harder than mastering two-wheel bike riding. Most of my teammates soloed after 10 minutes of tethered practice.”25 Of course, ten minutes of tethered practice on a device that can only fly for twenty-one seconds at a time amounted to more than twenty-eight flights. Courter left the math for the reader to figure out.
What fuel was Courter talking about? It’s hard to say. Bell never introduced a new fuel for its rocket belts although it would have been nice if they had found something as potent as Courter claimed. Hydrogen peroxide was dangerous and volatile stuff. Every second of burn time for the rocket belt consumed one and a half quarts of hydrogen peroxide; that small amount expanded into seventy thousand quarts of steam in a single second. Bill Suitor likened it to one milk carton of fuel expanding to ten school buses full of steam “faster than you can blink your eyes.”26 As one might imagine, anything packing that much of a punch is tricky to handle. Most materials commonly found in clothing will cause a reaction; the fuel would burn human skin on contact.27
Bell was always careful to only use the highest-grade nitrogen to push the fuel into the motor. Compressed air, such as that commonly found in SCUBA tanks, would contain too many impurities to be safely used.28 Hydrogen peroxide is a strange beast. The kind Bell used came in thirty gallon aluminum drums, enough for five to seven flights. The only thing that counteracts the chemical reaction of the fuel when it is ignited is water. The fuel handlers always kept buckets of water on hand to smother any hydrogen peroxide that got out. The aluminum fuel drums were designed to rupture rather than explode in the case of an unsafe buildup of gasses. In those cases, one pilot warned that you would still be in danger as the fuel spilled out of the broken drum: “Your shoes are one of the first victims; always be prepared with lots of water.”29 In the Popular Science article Courter described the revolutionary new fuel as best he could, considering that it was “still classified.” He said it would allow the rocket belt to fly for ten minutes—almost thirty times longer than the current flights—and that flights could conceivably run into hours in the near future.30 It’s hard to imagine that Courter was simply making this all up. It also doesn’t seem possible that he would be allowed to tell such a tall tale while still speaking on behalf of Bell, which he noted he was doing early in the piece. It can only be that Courter was referring to another advance Bell was working on, but it wasn’t a new fuel. It was a new engine. Thiokol had described the possibility of a flying belt powered by a small jet engine in their 1959 report. Of course, in 1959, Thiokol said it could not find anyone who could build an engine small and powerful enough to launch the flying belt. By 1964, Bell had found someone: Dr. Sam Williams of Williams Research, in Walled Lake, Michigan.